fiction and musings from a gay black dude with delusions above his station
We stood in front of a shelf marked 1953. A gap sat in the middle of otherwise tightly packed volumes. He began stroking the dust from the empty space. Again, it felt as if he were stroking my skin. This time I let myself experience it, for a little while. “Where are those volumes?” I…
During the Prop. 8 campaign four years ago, I received a mailer from the Yes on 8 folks which featured black religious figures on one side and then-presidential candidate Barack Obama on the other. It contained quotes like these: “Marriage is something that is sacred and worth defending as an institution of one man and…
Light, airy, and meticulously clean, attributes that well describe Mr. Horton’s apartment. His closet embodied the exact opposite. As we entered, he reached up and pulled a cord. A single bulb, brown with dust, hung on a thick wooly wire. The light revealed a cavern, cramped, long, and narrow with a pale wall grimed by…
Dear Washington, Congratulations! After much civil, heart felt debate you have swiftly adopted marriage equality for your citizens. This is a wonderful moment, and you should be rightly proud. You have now joined an elite club, though we both know that history is on our side and this club’s exclusivity will not last. In time,…
Grease splattering, water boiling, pots and pans clanking, bodies moving and shuffling, and layered above it all were the voices of the too many chefs against a backdrop of old school blues moaning its heart out. Crissy got annoyed. She always got annoyed. “Can’t we play something more upbeat than this? When I’m cooking I…
“TAXI!” “Where to, buddy?” “The St. Francis Hotel, please.” They rolled into town from SFO. The cabbie got off the freeway and coursed the streets of SOMA. “Look at those degenerates! All those tight pants and leather!” “Bothered by the gays, buddy?” “Oh! I just think they are such barbarians! They need to be disciplined!…
Groggy from lack of sleep, I rolled over early one morning just before Get Up time and put on my reading specs then turned on the Touch to read the latest headlines. At the SF Chronicle mobile site I find this: Demographer: US has 4M adults who identify as gay. Really? I thought in…
{Editors Note: The dialog between Jameel and Alfonso was taken from my unpublished novel Sin Against the Race.} He knew Hegel. He knew Marx. He knew Lenin. He knew Trotsky. He knew Mao. He knew Ché. He knew Cleaver. He knew a whole bunch of others that none of the rest of the group knew. …
This story could be called a love letter to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. I wrote it around the time I fell head over heels for all things Ellington and started listening to his music 23 out of 24 hours in the day — a practice I continue to the present time. I immersed myself in…
Ptolemy was an Egyptian-born Roman philosopher and scientist who lived around the First and Second centuries AD. He’s best known for the Ptolemaic System of the universe, an expansion of Aristotle’s view that the Earth laid at the center of universe and all the heavenly bodies, including the sun and stars, revolved around it. Aristotle’s…
